


Hard to Translate

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Coulson has been here before, Coulson just really really needs a hug, Coulson thinks Skye is dead, F/M, and Skye does too, angsty angsty angsty, i think, just finishing something before 2x12, post 2x11, skye and coulson love each other so much, so that works out well then, whatever that means
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 04:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3515150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He never said what needed to be said to Skye. Maybe because he thought it didn't need to be said. Maybe because he never quite figured out what it was he needed to say. Now that he has a chance to regret not saying it, he still doesn't know what it should have been. </p><p>(Coulson and Skye love each other *so much.* Whatever that means. Me dealing with feels and filling in missing scenes before and after the action of 2x11.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard to Translate

Coulson is slow, somber, as he arrives back at the Playground.

He'll miss Trip.

Trip, the symbol of what he's trying to build. Trip, the man who could always find a way to make a situation feel lighter. Trip, the one with the smile that could light up a room.

It's hard to imagine that there was a time when he was wary of Trip. Hard to remember that Trip hasn't been on the team since the beginning.

The atmosphere already feels different, already more sad, as he walks through the empty halls back to his office.

And it feels like disloyalty, like a mockery of the fact that he has lost someone so important in so many ways, but his thoughts turn to Skye. Skye who watched Trip die, who has been plagued with nightmares about it, who he last saw when she was trapped behind glass.

It takes a great deal of willpower to continue to his office, to stop himself from detouring to her bunk, but he manages.

 

* * *

 

_He's so desperate for her._

_He's never been so desperate for anyone, for anything, as he is for Skye._

_The tunnels are dark, and he runs down down them, lit only by the sickly green glow of his lantern. It's madness – complete madness – but he can't not do this, can't not follow her down, can't not go where she has gone._

“ _Skye_ ,” _he calls her name endlessly, pushing at the wall that has closed behind her, the wall she's locked behind. His entire world is narrowed to her, to the promise of her, to the need for her._

 

* * *

 

When he opens the door to his office, she's there, looking out the window, even though she obviously can't see anything beyond her own reflection.

Her back is to him, but he can see the reflection of her face, and their eyes meet in the darkened glass. He stops, doesn't approach any closer.

Something about her posture isn't inviting, like she's still behind glass, like she's still as inaccessible as she had been the last time he saw her.

“May told me you're out of the woods."

She turns to look at him, and it's like it takes her a minute to focus, a moment to see him.

He smiles, forcing the corners of his lips to turn upwards.

 

* * *

 

 

_He and Mack run when the earthquake starts._

_Well, that's not exactly true._

_He bangs at the wall hiding Skye from him until the ceiling caves in, until rock threatens to crush him, until Mack has to pull him away._

_**Then** he and Mack run._

_Luckily, the quake doesn't affect the lift, doesn't destroy the rocks that grant them an easy exit. And everything stills as they get there._

_Except that Coulson can't seem to force himself to step onto the lift. Not when Skye is still back there. Mack is the one that pushes him forward._

“ _Just you two?” They hear Simmons's voice from above, and Mack calls up an affirmative._

“ _Put these on!”_

_Simmons has instituted a quarantine protocol for anyone in the tunnels without adequate protection, so she tosses down two suits that will keep them contained until they can be checked out._

“ _I have to go back for her,” Coulson manages to tell Mack, looking back at the tunnel they've just run through. It's unrecognizable, strewn with debris, impassable up to the chamber where Skye is._

“ _No,” Mack corrects him. “You don't. You've got to get out of here.”_

_Mack sort of forces him into the suit and drags him onto the lift. Coulson doesn't fight it, not exactly, but his passivity makes it a struggle. He's just numb. He's numb, can't move his limbs of his own free will._

“ _Skye,” he becomes aware that he is whispering her name._

“ _She's gone, Coulson,” Mack tells him. “She's gone.”_

 

* * *

 

In his office, he smiles at her, at Skye, Skye the real life miracle.

Skye the real life miracle who has come back to him twice now.

His smile doesn't reach his eyes, though, and it's not just because of the loss he still feels. It's because Skye and Raina share something in their DNA, and it's too good to be true that Skye has escaped unscathed. It's too good to be true, but he's been telling himself stories about how she is fine, how she will be fine, how everything will go back to normal – a more somber normal without Trip, but a kind of normal.

She's always worn her heart on her face, and it's there right now, that she's not okay, not out of the woods, that nothing will be normal.

"Yeah, I am. Out of the woods." She lies, but the truth is that they both need the lie tonight, and the fact that it is a lie is like a secret between them.

 

* * *

 

_He's not fully quarantined, but Simmons orders him to the lab for bloodwork, to make sure that he's still himself. Of course, she also looks terrified of him, and he gets it because he's not sure he's been himself since Project TAHITI._

_That's stopped seeming like a bad thing, thanks to her, thanks to Skye._

_Skye who is gone._

_He has to be forced up top, body in an uncontrolled state of shock, but his brain is working well enough to know that it must be part of why Simmons looks so scared. It's like he's outside his body, looking down at himself, like he's not there anymore, like he's gone._

_Like Skye. Like Skye, who is gone._

_Every time he thinks about her, he feels himself crash into his body, crash down through his feet._

_It's not even guilt – though he's aware enough to know that guilt will come later. It's just loss._

_And Coulson has lost before._

_He lost his father when he was young, but that loss always felt more like a loss of opportunity, like the loss of a potential for a relationship, like the cementing of an absence he had felt his whole life._

_He lost his mother. A long time ago, now, but it's still fresher, still painful. Her death, though, followed a long period of sickness, a long period of coming to terms with what would be, a long period of being able to say what needed to be said._

_This loss is different. Palpably, painfully different._

_Perhaps because he never said what needed to be said to Skye. Maybe because he thought it **didn't need** to be said. Maybe because he never quite figured out what it was he needed to say. _

_He still doesn't know. Now that he has a chance to regret not saying it, he still doesn't know what it should have been._

 

* * *

 

He takes a few paces across the room and pauses again, feeling the distance like a gulf between them. It was just 48 hours ago that he was running down into the tunnels after her, not sure he'd ever make it back up.

When their eyes meet again, Skye's are wet, and Coulson takes the last few steps to reach her side.

It was just 48 hours ago that he last touched her, his hand smoothing across her cheek as he struggled to breathe through Kevlar and bruised ribs. It feels like ages, though.

She looks at him with so much in her eyes, and he wonders what she thought about when she was trapped under rubble. If she had thought of him.

It's selfish and stupid, he knows this, but since he found out she's alive he's been struggling with what he needs to say. With how to say it. And he wants to believe that she's with him on this, facing the same struggle.

Perhaps it's because if they're facing the same struggle, nothing really needs to be said.

Skye opens her mouth, but no words come out for a moment, until it looks like she practically forces them out in a painful whisper.

“I'm so sorry.”

 

* * *

 

_He's sitting on a table in the lab when they announce it._

_The electromagnetic imaging equipment is able to penetrate the remains of the city, is able to get a basic idea not of a map, but of density. Of spots where a person might be trapped alive or where a body might be buried._

_It gives him a flash of hope, quickly crushed by the terror of having to see her lifeless body._

_Again._

_Having to see her lifeless body again._

_And that's the rub of it, perhaps. That he's been here before. He's been here wishing he had said all the things that need to be said. He's been here wishing that he even knew what those things are. He's been here looking down at her, ready to move heaven and earth to make her okay._

_But he's already worked the only miracle he has up his sleeve. He has no more miracles to work, nothing more he could to do bring her lifeless body back from the brink._

_And Coulson hasn't prayed since he was a boy. He lost faith in a higher power young, has always tried to put his faith in people instead, but he prays for a miracle that he knows no person will have the power to grant._

 

* * *

 

"I'm so sorry," she whispers, again, again. “I'm so sorry.”

Before, it had made him almost angry – that Skye would feel the need to apologize for his mistakes, for Hydra's plot, for Grant Ward's selfish machinations, for Raina's greed.

Anger has dissipated, though.

He's made someone pay. He has made Hydra pay, and he has done it in Trip's name, but he has also done it for her.

It doesn't make him angry anymore, her sad apologies, her guilt for something that isn't her fault. It just makes him sad, just makes him wish that much harder that he knew what to say.

“Skye,” he sighs her name and reaches towards her, but stops before his hand connects with her arm. It's strange how, in the time he sat outside the quarantine room, he thought of little else but touching her. Now, though, it feels even less possible than it did when it was impossible; now, even though she's touchable, it feels like there is a wall of glass between them. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.”

She shakes her head, her eyes too big and sad and wise for him to handle, like she pities him.

“I do.”

 

* * *

 

_He doesn't know they've found her until he sees them herding her into the quarantine chamber, visible from where he sits in the lab. And he doesn't even see her at first, just another hazmat suit._

_Once inside, two techs in similar suits pull off her protection, revealing who they have found, and Coulson is up off the table, rushing towards the glass door of this little room. The sight of her face – remarkably unharmed, remarkably perfect – makes his heart crash in his chest in double time, and all he knows is that he has to be at her side._

_Before he's even made it out of his section the lab, though, the techs have tugged her shirt over her head, and he freezes, hand pressed up against the glass door to his little room. Shirt is followed by bra, pants, boots, socks, underwear, all of it chucked into a plastic bag marked with a bio-hazard symbol. It happens quickly, with clinical efficiency, leaving Skye naked and shaking slightly, too much in shock to even cover herself._

_They clothe her in a hospital-style gown almost instantly, so it's not the fact of her nudity that makes him look down, but he finally does avert his gaze. Because it's too much to see Skye stripped of everything – and it's not the clothes; it's something else, something more that has been taken from her._

_It looks like she's been unmade, and once he's taken a few deep, slow breaths, Coulson finally opens the door and approaches the quarantine chamber._

_She's in a gown, still curled into herself, still almost unaware of the rest of the world around her._

“ _...safe under the one area that didn't collapse.”_

“ _What?”_

_Coulson is startled to realize that Fitz is next to him, that Fitz has been speaking to him._

“ _She was in the one part of the cavern that didn't crumble. It's...”_

“ _A miracle,” Coulson whispers._

_Slowly, he raises his hand and lays it against the glass wall, right as Skye finally looks up, finally sees him. She smiles, a sad little broken smile but still a smile, and rises from the bed._

_She raises her hand, and he thinks for a moment that she'll lay it against the glass in the same spot where his hand rests, but she glances at Fitz and then lowers it back down to her side. Instead, she just looks at him, drinking in the sight of him the same way he's drinking her in._

_Neither of them immediately notice when Fitz backs away to take care of something else._

 

* * *

 

“Skye,” Coulson whispers her name,

“Are you okay?” She asks, and her eyes are so big and warm and soft, like all that matters to her is his answer.

“Okay,” he agrees.

“It was hard seeing Trip's mom.” He supposes that she means it to be a question, but it comes out as a statement, perhaps because she doesn't need to ask the question, perhaps just because her voice is soft and tired.

“Yes.”

“He was a good man. He's what SHIELD should be about.”

And he doesn't understand what she's saying, knows he's missing some connection happening in her brain.

“Yes. Because SHIELD is about loyalty, and courage, and never giving up the on people you believe in.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course I do.” He answers without thinking, and is brought back to his fear that Skye is not fine, that Skye is not out of the woods. “You never gave up on me,” he tells her.

“No,” she agrees, “I didn't. I wouldn't.”

“Skye,” he sighs her name again and finally closes the gap between them, finally lays his hand on her shoulder.

He doesn't know what to say, doesn't know what needs to be expressed, but he knows that he _needs_ this. He needs to feel her alive, needs to feel the physical reality of this miracle that has brought her back to him.

She flinches slightly when his palm curves around her shoulder, though, and he pulls back.

“No.” Her voice is weak, the voice of someone who has been crying for two solid days, but her hand raises and presses against his, holding his palm to her shoulder.

 

* * *

 

_Coulson opens his mouth to speak several times, but can't seem to make anything come out. He wants to tell her, he wants her to know, but he's still not sure what it is he needs to say, what it is she needs to know._

_Finally, probably because she is somewhat aware of the fact that they are alone, Skye lays her hand on the glass against his – just a brief taste of not-quite-contact, but it's enough for the moment._

  

* * *

 

Coulson opens his mouth to speak several times, but can't seem to make anything come out. He wants to tell her, he wants her to know, but he's still not sure what it is he needs to say, what it is she needs to know.

Their hands rest together on her shoulder, though, and the contact makes him bold enough to press for more, to pull her into a hug. He moves slowly, giving her every chance to back away, but Skye comes easily, like she needs it as much as he does.

Her arms circle his waist, holding him to her so that they're pressed firmly together, and his arms fold around her shoulders, right hand moving to cup the back of her head.

She's had a chance to use her own shower, her own shampoo, because she smells comfortingly familiar – like _Skye_ – and he breathes deeply against the top of her head.

He can feel her shudder as she takes a similarly deep breath against the side of his neck.

And he still doesn't know how to say what it is he feels, what it is he needs to tell her, but he knows this is a good start.


End file.
